


carrot top

by deniigiq



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, Reference to Eating Disorders, brief reference to bullying, finding the baby pictures, i must follow carrot-top matt with fingerling potato foggy one day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 04:11:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14536356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “Matty, you were a redhead? A li’l carrot? An actual pumpkin? Oh my god, look at those cheeks. OH MY GOD FRECKLES.”Matt was hit with the thought that maybe if he just laid very, very still, his heart would stop and he’d be able to escape this new suffering.





	carrot top

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you go house hunting and feel so bad afterwards that only Foggy finding Matt's baby pictures will make you feel better  
> I had to learn through other sources that Matt canonically has red hair. It looks absolutely absurd and I love it and we have been deprived.

When Matt was a kid, he’d been a full-on, flaming, pick-‘em-outta-the-crowd carrot top. His head darkened with age and he was real smug about it.

It didn’t matter as much now, but when he was a kid, it was damn near a death sentence. When Jack had been alive, they’d had several Come To Jesus meetings about it around the kitchen table.

Jack had put his face into his hands and sighed the third time the principal called him away from training to sequester his violent child. He’d sat Matt at the table and made sure that he knew he was very disappointed in him being disruptive at school. Then he told him to go for the solar plexis or the kidneys next time.

It worked and it continued working well up until college.

By eighteen, he’d made the full transition from carrot-top to brunet. He knew this because it said so on his state ID. And again, he was real smug about it. That and the diploma and the letter of acceptance to college. He had fantasies of running into one of the bullies from middle school and asking what the fuck they had to show for their trouble.

Logically, he knew that there was a picture on the ID, and that there’d been a picture on all of his previous student IDs, but he’d never given it too much thought. The only ID which had mattered at the time was the fake one that got him into bars.

By the time he’d gotten into law school, he’d amassed a collection of IDs, which he’d thrown into a box in his closet and subsequently forgotten about. The IDs came with him to college in his box of sentimental things, and then they went with him to grad school and eventually they went with him to his apartment.

Then, because God forsook him on a semi-regular basis, Foggy found them.

“Matt. Matt. Matthew.”

“What?” he grumbled, half under his bed, trying to find the shoebox full of old documents he kept under there. Spring-cleaning was almost always a team effort for him and he usually paid Foggy in food and beer. They’d just sorted through the shit in what Foggy like to call his panic closet, the closet which housed the suit and had since collected multiple first aid kids, a nest of torn clothes, and, to Foggy’s disgust, some ripped off gauze and bandages Matt had forgotten about.

“Matthew. I cannot believe you. You have been hiding this from me for so, so long. And that is a _travesty_.”

“I’m gonna need more information than that,” Matt prompted, fingers finally catching the storage box under the bed.

“Matty, you were a redhead? A li’l carrot? An actual pumpkin? Oh my god, look at those cheeks. OH MY GOD FRECKLES.”

Matt was hit with the thought that maybe if he just laid very, very still, his heart would stop and he’d be able to escape this new suffering.

“Matthew. In third grade you were missing a tooth. You must have had a lisp! A tiny, baby carrot with a lisp? Matt. Tell me you had a lisp.”

“I had no such thing,” he snapped, then remembered he was trying to become one with the floor.

“The evidence is irrefutable,” Foggy chimed, delighted with his discovery. “You know who deserves to see this?”

Matt launched himself up from the floor. He put a little of the devil into mugging at Foggy. It didn’t seem to work, his heart remained steady.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Do what?” Foggy answered, smoothly. “Take a picture of this and send it to Jess, Claire, and Karen? Matty, why on _earth_ would I do that?”

A camera shutter.

Matt lunged for the phone. It took pinning every one of Foggy’s limbs to get it and the terrifying effect was lost in Foggy’s cackling.

“Delete it,” he demanded. Foggy laughed. “Fogs, I mean it.”

“Why? Is it gonna ruin your street cred? Matty, have you been repressing inner redhead this whole time? Have you been dyeing your hair?” Matt jawed at him for almost five whole seconds before Foggy relaxed in his grip.

“Alright, alright,” Foggy relented, “I’ll delete it. Get off.”

Matt squinted suspiciously.

“I mean it, bud. I’ll delete it, get off.”

“No, you _said_ you deleted that one pic that one time, but I _know_ you showed it to Karen last week. I know it.”

“Which one? The one of you being assaulted by the Donald Duck mascot or the one when Marci taped your face on everything at your desk at Landman and Zak? They are both national treasures.”

Matt knew better than to grace that with an answer.

“Oh no, you mean the video of you drunk-crying over the ending of Old Yeller.”

“Foggy.”

“It’s an emotional scene, man.”

“Foggy.”

“For the record that vid is also a national treasure.”

“Franklin.”

“Matthew.”

“Delete it, for real.” Foggy sighed.

“Okay, I will. You still need to get off.”

Matt sat back on his heels and shoved the phone into Foggy’s hand. Foggy, true to his word, tapped around and deleted the picture.

“It’s gone,” he told Matt solemnly.

“Promise?”

“Promise. I am bereft of my tiny Tomato-Matt evidence.”

There was an awkward lull.

“I used to get bullied a lot for it,” Matt said, aiming for nonchalant as he stood up to fetch some drinks as a peace offering.

“For having red hair?”

“Yeah, blind red-head with sunglasses and a big stick. I mean, I was prime bully material.”

“You know your hair is still a little red right?”

Matt almost dropped the coke can.

“What.”

“Woah, man. Chill. It’s only in the light.” Matt pushed the can into Foggy’s hand and plopped down on the floor next to him.

“Dude, you have assumed full pout. It’s hair.”

Matt didn’t say anything, twisting a few strands through his fingers ruefully.

“Fogs, you are literally obsessed with your hair.”

“Yeah, because it is majestic and deserves it. For real, your hair is fine, its really dark. Like, almost black.”

“Except it’s red.”

“It has layers, man. Hair isn’t just one color.”

Matt fidgeted with the tab on his can. The soda was too cold to smell sickly yet. The bubbles of carbonation fizzed in his ears.

“My dad said he had red hair growing up, too. He used to promise me it’d get dark. When I could see, I remember thinking that we didn’t look anything alike,” Matt swallowed, but didn’t take a sip of soda, “I guess I thought that he was just saying that to be nice, and like, secretly, I wasn’t his kid. He’d just found me on the street or something.”

Foggy was quiet for a beat.

“That’s just like you isn’t it? Man, those abandonment issues run deep.”

Matt chuckled. Foggy tapped at his phone.

“You were a cute kid, though, you know? That’s more than I can say, baby Foggy was like a fingerling potato until like eighth-grade.”

“I doubt that. What happened in eighth-grade?”

“Oh you know, crippling anxiety and a short bout of anorexia.”

Matt pulled back, shocked.

“I didn’t know,” he stuttered. He felt Foggy shrug.

“I didn’t tell you.”

Another silence.

“Kids are pretty fucking terrible,” Matt said.

“Yeah they are,” Foggy agreed. “Anyways! I might have lied and sent those pictures to Karen.”

Matt flinched. Foggy was a little stiff, waiting to see how he’d take it. Trying to determine when to start apologizing. He had offered an eye for an eye, though, so Matt decided to spare him.

“You asshole.”

“You will be happy to know that I deleted the one I took of my pocket this morning.”

Matt couldn’t help it. He started giggling. He steadied the can before he spilled it.

“She might have sent me like eight texts just now.”

“What have I ever done to you?”

“You want the list alphabetically or chronologically?” There wasn’t too much to say to that.

 “You wanna hear what she said?” Matt picked up Foggy’s abandoned drink and shoved it at his hand until he took it.

“Of course, but I am not responsible for anything I do under embarrassment.” Foggy scooched himself a foot away as a precaution. He tapped on his phone, then snorted into his drink.  

“She says ‘Oh my god, twinsies!’--She sent all those in their own bubbles--‘We even lost the same tooth! Hold on lemme find my mine!”

Matt smirked and finally took sip of coke; the carbonation burned in his nose.

“Matt, Karen looks just like the little girl from Up. The one who marries Mr. Frederickson. She’s even wearing the same overalls. And a wolf shirt? Pretty sure that’s a wolf shirt. Oh my god, what a nerd. She’s got mad frizz, someone get this girl a brush. A wicked sunburn, too, yikes. We should take her for a skin cancer screening.”  

“I dunno, pretty sure a wolf shirt was the peak of coolness in third grade,” Matt goaded. “I’m thinking that Karen has been cooler than us our entire lives.”

Foggy was quiet in the way he was when he was seriously considering something.

“Okay, but we can’t tell her that. I’m gonna text back ‘what a fucking nerd.’ And I’m signing it from both of us.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I get the feeling that Foggy's always been self conscious about his weight and he makes jokes to cover up for that, especially since all his friends are basically models.


End file.
